The present invention relates generally to communications systems.
Electronic mail, or email, is a medium often used by knowledge workers to exchange or otherwise share information. By way of example, a knowledge worker may send an email to a group of users to solicit information he needs to perform a task. The knowledge worker may receive the solicited information from one or more of the users. If the one or more users respond such that only one response to an original email is provided at a time, then a response chain associated with the original email is substantially linear.
However, if more than one user who receives an email separately responds to the email at substantially the same time, then the response chain associated with the email loses its linearity. When multiple users generate separate responses to the same email at approximately the same time, confusion may result as users are unaware that other users are also responding to the email.